The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
The trademark legal clearance and protection industry is currently suffering greatly from “information overload” due to the increase in the amount of information available in the clearance process as a result of technology changes over last few decades. These changes have happened steadily, and the industry has been slow to respond to the change in the amount of information due to a strong culture of tradition in the legal industry.
Information overload is characterized by difficulties a person may encounter when trying to understand complex issues or make a decision due to the presence of too much information. Studies show that decision makers have a limited cognitive processing capacity, and when facing an information overload, there is a higher chance that decision quality will be adversely impacted. The impact of information overload on the trademark legal clearance and protection industry is significant. The industry is struggling to find a balance between risk mitigation and loss of productivity due to increased information in the trademark clearance process.
While the information continues to grow significantly, no new tools are being implemented to curate and present the information so that it may be effectively processed. Current best practices and methods of trademark clearance can no longer support the large data sizes now occurring in the trademark clearance process due to the primitive means for presenting search results. Further, practitioners are struggling to arrive at confident risk analysis decisions and communicate their findings to brand owners due to the challenges of processing such large amounts of cluttered information. Trademark data has grown too large to be effectively analyzed under the current method of performing a clearance search.
The existing systems typically implement serial data review techniques (spreadsheets, lists, full records, etc.), which is daunting for a large set of search results. More particularly, these presentation techniques generally require that the user traverse numerous generations of screens to collect all the necessary information. Moreover, the existing systems do not allow the user to simultaneously review multiple, mutually independent factors when reviewing results during trademark clearance.